Metaphor and metonymy in Magritte

Daniela Medalla

Julia Tinoco

Marita Abbud

Roberta Fabri

• Randa Dubnick’s article “Visible poetry: metaphor and metonymy in the paintings of René Magritte” (1980)

• Her work is based on Roman Jakobson’s work

metaphor

La Trahison des Images

• similarity

• dissimilarity

• metaphor as the secondary reading

metonymy

Les affinités electives

•contiguity

• metonymy as a local process of transfer

metaphor and metonymy in visual arts

La cascade

Painting is poetry and always written in verse with plastic rhymes, never in prose.

—Picasso, from a letter to Francoise Gilot

C.S.Pierce:

"Iconic signs take a visually similar form to the thing

they stand for, thus have a meteaphorical

relationship to the referent".

Example: the picture of an airplane. The referent is

an aircraft and it actually stand for an airplane.

When we see an airplane in a picture refering to an

airport it is based on casuality, association or

contiguity and the index and the referent have a

metonymic relationship.

Clé des songes

Inspired by Peirce’s concepts of similarity and

contiguity, Roman Jakobson viewed metaphor

and metonymy as two major modes of

association, triggering and interacting in most

meaning-making processes, be they ordinary

or artistic.

He argued that certain poets and art schools

exhibit a tendency for either the metonymic

or metaphoric style. Cubism, for instance,

appears to be inherently metonymic in

nature, whereas Surrealism has a tendency

for metaphorical symbolism.

Le chatêau des pyrenées

René Magritte(1898 – 1967)

• ordinary objects in an unusual context

• poetic imagery

• not a thing; an image of the thing

“It is a union that suggests the essential mystery of the world. Art for me is not an end in itself, but a means of evoking that mystery.” ”

— René Magritte on putting seemingly unrelated objects together in juxtaposition

La durée poignard

• Similarity or dissimilarity → metaphor

• Spatial or temporal relationship; contiguity → metonymy

subtle association based either on contiguity or similarity

Les vacances de Hegel(Hegel’s Holiday)

La legende dorée(The Golden Legend)

• changes in scales

• negation of normal spatial relationship

techniques of realism -> undermine reality

Les promenades d’Euclide